The record now: what stands where

The county's fauna as the assembled record leaves it, 2026

The standings: Read end to end, this section divides the county's animals into four companies. The gone, on the record's word: the bison and the elk of the Parkovash, the black wolf and the bear and the panther of Chapman's list, the passenger pigeon of his roosts, the prairie chicken of his warning — and among the birds of passage, the whooping crane as a county presence and the pelican's visits, ended before the ditching was done. The restored: the deer, from an 1893 state extirpation to an ordinary abundance; the turkey, released back between 1956 and 2004; the otter, delisted in 2005 on the strength of 303 Louisiana animals and their spread; the beaver, engineering Potato Creek again; the bald eagle, nesting in the county for the first time on record in 2015 and every year since; the osprey, at its densest Indiana nesting concentration on Worster Lake; the peregrine, sixty-three chicks into a downtown territory older than some of the buildings' current tenants. The built: a trout and salmon river assembled by two states and the federal government between 1983 and 1992, counted fish by fish at the South Bend ladder; and beside it the lake sturgeon, unbuilt and unrestored, holding its remnant spawning ground between the dams. And the arrived, uninvited: the zebra mussel, on the state's list for this river in this county — while the invasive carps, the agencies state in 2026, are not here, held at a front on another river system downstream of the Kankakee's Indiana rise.

The discipline of the file: What this section has not printed is as deliberate as what it has. No animal stands in these pages on a sighting without a confirming record; no last-animal date appears that a named source did not give; the county's wolf hunts, its first eagle nest before 2015, its trumpeter swans, and its Potawatomi Park rookery were all looked for and not found, and they are printed as not found. The wild record of a city is easy to decorate and hard to keep. South Bend's, kept straight, runs from a lost Frenchman's belt of opossums in 1679 to a falcon cam on a government tower — and every step of it stands on a document with a date.

Sources:

1. The entries of this section, each on its own sources.